Make no mistake, Crazy Town are neither a town nor are they crazy. (Well,

maybe they're a little out-of-whack.)

Crazy Town are actually a Californian "rip-hop" (rock and hip-hop) guitar

band in the vein of Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, SlipKnot and Coal Chamber.

What Crazy Town like to do is get pissy drunk, as rapper Shifty Shellshock

freely admits on the sardonic romp "Only When I'm Drunk" (RealAudio

excerpt): "Crazy's comin' through and you know we're going to blow up/ Hold up, wait, I think I'm going to throw up/ ... false alarm/ I'm getting all the ladies with my cool charm/ When I get drunk I might even call my daddy a punk." So it makes sense that their debut CD, The Gift of Game, be rooted in teen angst while climaxing off a Jack Daniels–induced stupor.

Their disc is full of slick, lacerating guitar riffs, hip-hop rhythms and

cheeky raps. In addition, bandmembers Faydoe Deelay (bassist), Rust Epique

(guitarist), Trouble Valli (guitarist), James Bradley Jr. (drummer) and

DJ AM (turntablist) add volume and agility and mix multiple influences

into their music.

The album's most interesting pop song, "Black Cloud" (RealAudio

excerpt) (featuring singer Jay Gordon from Orgy), is a tight

binding of nineties rap, shimmering electro-pop and grinding metal music.

When the droning melodies come in to complement the hypnotic guitar, it's

reminiscent of the noisy synth-driven radio hits from such '80s artists

as Human League. With rapper "Epic" Mazur's meditative rants about

catastrophes and bad karma, he rhymes: "I'm a diamond-in-the rough/

Could I suffer enough?/ I'm gettin' high for a livin'/ Not givin' a fuck/

These hard times got me stuck/ Stuck in a jam/ I'm the monkey on your

back/ And the crack in the dam."

Epic has formidable rap skills, as his lyrics chainsaw through the anthemic

"Toxic" and coarsen the raunchy pimp track "Players." While his buddy

Shifty can be pedestrian — as on "Think Fast" — he is lyrically

sharp directing his affectionate wordplays toward a pretty girl on

"Butterfly." And when the guitar-maxing "B-Boy 2000" (RealAudio

excerpt) reveals guest rapper KRS-One's old-school B-Boy rhymes,

it doesn't sound like a gimmicky attempt at being cool with hip-hop but

the group's true rip-hop sophistication.

The Gift of Game is a Jägermeister tailor-made for a rocking

night party, or better yet, a morning-after hair-of-the-dog. Cheers.